Exhibition | Tromelin: The Island of the Forgotten Slaves
Now on view at Château des Ducs de Bretagne:
Tromelin: L’île des esclaves oubliés / The Island of the Forgotten Slaves
Château des Ducs de Bretagne, Nantes, 17 October 2015 — 30 April 2016
After leaving Bayonne on November 17, 1760, the Utile, a ship belonging to the French East India Company washed up on the Île de Sable (today: Tromelin Island—a 1-square-kilometer desert isle off the coast of Madagascar) on July 31, 1761. The ship was transporting 160 Malagasy slaves who were smuggled out of the country, intended to be sold to Île de France (now Mauritius). The crew returned to Madagascar on a raft, leaving 80 slaves on the island, with the promise to return and rescue them. Only fifteen years later, on November 29, 1776, did the ensign and future knight, Tromelin, return at the helm of the corvette La Dauphine. He rescued the eight surviving slaves: seven women and one eight-month child.
The goal of this exhibition is to recall an important period of maritime history along with the question of slavery and slave-trading in the Indian Ocean, illustrated by this shipwreck and the Malagasy survivors who tried to survive for nearly fifteen years on this tiny, inhospitable island.
The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the GRAN (Group Recherche en Archéologie Navale) and the INRAP (Institut National de Recherche Archéologique Préventive) for the excavations they performed on the island and underwater. Research on this shipwreck and the life of those who were ultimately rescued has been the focus of a multidisciplinary study with the aim of shedding light on the circumstances behind the tragic event. It also documents the living conditions of those who survived the best they could.
Exhibition | Watteau’s Soldiers: Scenes of Military Life
Press release (23 October 2015) from The Frick:
Watteau’s Soldiers: Scenes of Military Life in Eighteenth-Century France
The Frick Collection, New York, 12 July — 2 October 2016
Curated by Aaron Wile
Jean-Antoine Watteau, The Portal of Valenciennes (La Porte de Valenciennes), ca. 1711−12, oil on canvas, 12 3/4 x 16 inches (New York: The Frick Collection; photo by Michael Bodycomb)
It would be difficult to think of an artist further removed from the muck and misery of the battlefield than Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), who is known as a painter of amorous aristocrats and melancholy actors, a dreamer of exquisite parklands and impossibly refined fêtes. And yet, early in his career, Watteau painted a number of scenes of military life, remarkable for their deeply felt humanity and intimacy. These pictures were produced during one of the darkest chapters of France’s history, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). But the martial glory on which most military painters of the time trained their gaze—the fearsome arms, snarling horses, and splendid uniforms of generals glittering amid the smoke of cannon fire—held no interest for Watteau, who focused instead on the most prosaic aspects of war: the marches, halts, encampments, and bivouacs that defined the larger part of military life. Inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish genre scenes, the resulting works show the quiet moments between the fighting, when soldiers could rest and daydream, smoke pipes and play cards.
Watteau produced about a dozen of these military scenes, but only seven survive. Though known primarily only to specialists, they were once counted among the artist’s most admired works and owned by such prominent figures as Catherine the Great and the Prince of Conti. Presented exclusively at The Frick Collection in the summer of 2016, Watteau’s Soldiers is the first exhibition devoted solely to these captivating pictures, introducing the artist’s engagement with military life to a larger audience while offering a fresh perspective on the subject. Among the paintings, drawings, and prints are four of the seven known paintings—with the Frick’s own Portal of Valenciennes as the centerpiece—as well as the recently rediscovered Supply Train, which has never before been exhibited publicly in a museum. Also featured are about twelve studies of soldiers in red chalk, many directly related to the paintings on view.
Jean-Antoine Watteau, The Supply Train (Escorte d’équipages), ca. 1715, oil on panel, 11 1/8 x 12 3/8 inches (Private collection)
The works on display offer a rare opportunity to study the drawings and paintings together and probe Watteau’s complex and remarkable working methods. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Watteau did not proceed methodically from compositional sketches, studies, and full-scale models to the final painting. Instead, his process followed the whims of his imagination and the demands of the moment. He began by drawing soldiers from life, without a predetermined end in mind. These drawings provided him with a stock of figures, often used multiple times, that he would arrange in an almost spontaneous fashion on the canvas. As a result, figures previously isolated in his sketchbook were brought together and juxtaposed in new social relationships on the canvas, producing the ambiguous, dreamlike effects that make his paintings so intriguing.
The exhibition is rounded out by a selection of works by Watteau’s predecessors and followers: the Frick’s Calvary Camp by Philips Wouwerman, a typical example of the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings after which Watteau modeled his own; a study of a soldier by Watteau’s follower Jean-Baptiste Pater, from the Fondation Custodia, Paris; and a painting of a military camp by his other great follower, Nicolas Lancret, from a private collection. These works shed light on the ways in which Watteau transformed the painting of military life in Europe, demonstrating his pivotal influence on the genre.
Aaron Wile, Watteau’s Soldiers: Scenes of Military Life in Eighteenth-Century France (London: D. Giles, 2016), 112 pages, ISBN: 978-1907804793, £25 / $40.
Published by The Frick Collection in association with D Giles, Ltd., London, the book accompanying the exhibition is the first illustrated catalogue of all Watteau’s works related to military subjects.
Additional works included in the exhibition are illustrated here»
Exhibition | Greece’s Enchanting Landscape
Edward Dodwell, The Parthenon, Athens, after 1805, watercolor, framed: 58.4 × 73.7 cm (The Packard Humanities Institute, Accession No. VEX.2015.1.35).
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Press release (12 October 2015) from The Getty:
Greece’s Enchanting Landscape: Watercolors by Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades (Los Angeles), 21 October 2015 — 15 February 2016
Curated by David Saunders
“Almost every rock, every promontory, every river, is haunted by the shadows of the mighty dead,” wrote the English antiquarian Edward Dodwell of his travels in Greece at the beginning of the nineteenth century. During this time, he and the Italian artist Simone Pomardi traversed the country, producing around one thousand watercolors and drawings of the ancient Greek countryside.
On view at the Getty Villa October 21, 2015 – February 15, 2016, Greece’s Enchanted Landscapes: Watercolors by Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi presents, for the first time in the United States, a selection of 44 magnificent illustrations from the expansive archive acquired by the Packard Humanities Institute, as well as four photographs from the Getty Museum’s photographs collection and six prints from the collection of the Getty Research Institute. They depict picturesque landscapes infused with memories of the classical past, often in striking juxtaposition with the realities of Greek life under Ottoman rule. The exhibition culminates in a series of monumental panoramas of Athens, each over thirteen-feet-long, that are both sweeping in scope and rich in scrupulous detail.
“These captivating drawings represent one of the most beautiful and compelling manifestations of Europe’s fascination with modern and ancient Greece—its landscape, archaeological sites and social customs—in the years before its independence from Ottoman rule,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Displaying them at the Getty Villa, alongside our unparalleled collections of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art, will allow visitors to experience these unique images in a particularly appropriate setting.” Potts adds: “We are particularly grateful to David Packard and the Packard Humanities Institute, not only for their generosity in supporting this exhibition, but for the decades of work they have done in researching, preserving, and publishing this extraordinary body of work that serves as an important record of Greece’s ancient past.”
Edward Dodwell and/or Simone Pomardi, Removal of Sculptures from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin’s Men, after 1801, watercolor (The Packard Humanities Institute). Read Dodwell’s description here
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Edward Dodwell (1777/78–1832) was one of an increasing number of travelers in the nineteenth century who combined Hellenism—an erudite passion for the legacy of Greek antiquity—with documentary intent. He first traveled through Greece in 1801, and then returned in 1805 with the Italian artist Simone Pomardi (1757–1830). They toured the country for fourteen months, drawing and documenting the landscape in all its aspects. Dodwell described the objective of his travels in Greece as “to leave nothing unnoticed,” and the illustrations—many never published—are a valuable record of the country and its monuments in the years at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
“The sight of ancient temples lying in ruin, or of the Greek people under Turkish rule, contrasted poignantly with nostalgic imaginings of the classical past. Yet for Dodwell and Pomardi, such juxtapositions only magnified the lost splendor of Greek antiquity,” says David Saunders, curator of the exhibition.
For many of their illustrations, the artists made extensive use of the camera obscura, an optical device that Dodwell described as “that infallible medium of truth and accuracy.” This is most fully apparent with the panoramas of Athens. Combining expansive vistas and topographical exactitude on a grand scale, the four monumental illustrations in this exhibition are the most complete expression of Dodwell and Pomardi’s project to document Greece, and capture what Dodwell referred to as “the delights of the present, and recollections of the past.” Also, included in the exhibition is a portable tent camera obscura from the Getty’s collection. Dodwell and Pomardi would have used a similar camera obscura during their travels.
Greece’s Enchanted Landscapes: Watercolors by Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi is curated by David Saunders, associate curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum. This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Packard Humanities Institute
Exhibition | Wicked Wit: Darly’s Comic Prints
Album of Darly prints in the Chester Beatty Collection (Wep 0494), with its much deteriorated eighteenth-century binding, as photographed in the Library’s conservation studio in 2015. More information is available at the Chester Beatty Conservation Blog.
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Now on view at the Chester Beatty Library:
Wicked Wit: Darly’s Comic Prints
Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Castle, Dublin, 11 September 2015 — 14 February 2016
Curated by Jill Unkel
Drawing on the Library’s own collections, this exhibition features over 100 hand-coloured, eighteenth-century etchings by the husband and wife team, Mary and Matthew Darly. From the time of their marriage, they worked in tandem designing, engraving and publishing prints using the signature, MD or MDarly.
This printer-publisher team produced well over 500 comic images of Caricatures, Macaronies, and Characters from no. 39 Strand (London) between 1770 and 1780. At the height of their fame, carriages lined the streets so their occupants could titter at the images on display in Darly’s Comic Exhibitions, held every spring from 1773 to 1778. By the end of the decade, they had become so popular that their publications were available throughout Great Britain and Ireland, Europe and even America. The name Darly became synonymous with the humorous images they produced.
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The catalogue is available for purchase through the Beatty Library’s shop:
Jill Unkel, Wicked Wit: Darly’s Comic Prints (Dublin: Chester Beatty Library, 2015), 80 pages, ISBN: 978-0957399822, 20€.
This fully illustrated catalogue is divided into a number of themes and opens with a general introduction to Mary and Matthew Darly. It then examines more specifically their comic prints, publications, and exhibitions. This is followed by a more detailed exploration of the various subjects presented in their comic images: stereotyped characters (and their relation to theatre), caricatures of notable contemporaries, satires of the dress of young macaroni (akin to a dandy or fop) men and their feathered-feminine counterparts, and finally the impolitical satires related to the war with the American Colonies.
Exhibition | Dutch Dining: Four Centuries of Table Settings
Thanks to Hélène Bremer for noting this exhibition (along with installation by Bouke de Vries). . .
Nederland Dineert: Vier Eeuwen Tafelcultuur
Dutch Dining: Four Centuries of Table Settings
Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, 28 February 2016
Fine dining is a form of sensory seduction. It operates not only via the taste buds, but also via the visual appeal of the food and table setting. Beautiful porcelain and silverware, glittering crystal, fine damask and extravagant sugarwork table ornaments all have a part to play. This exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag uses a spectacular display of complete table settings, complemented by drawings, paintings and liveries, to bring the history of formal dining among the Netherlands’ wealthy elite, ruling class and royal house to vivid life. The perfect place to find inspiration for that very special Christmas dinner table!
Dutch Dining paints a fascinating picture of the way people in the top echelons of Dutch society were once accustomed to dine together. At tables laden with exquisite culinary delights and surrounded by an army of liveried footmen. The show is both a feast for the eye and a unique insight into the past. All of the objects in the reconstructed table settings are completely authentic—from the tableware to the ornaments, and even the furniture. The table linen comes from the very linen cupboard in which it has lain ever since the 18th century.
No table setting would be complete without meticulously folded napkins. The European fashion for the decorative use of table linen dates back to the Renaissance. In our own day, Catalan artist Joan Sallas is reviving this ‘forgotten art’ with his astonishingly skilful birds, fish and rabbits. The exhibition will feature ten such virtuoso constructions, all specially folded for the occasion.
An exclusive peek inside the royal porcelain and silverware cabinet will transport visitors right to the heart of the Noordeinde Palace. Stars of the show are two complete table services—a silver one of modern design and its more traditional porcelain counterpart—on loan from the collection of the Dutch Royal House. Both services were presented to Queen Wilhelmina and Prince Hendrik on the occasion of their marriage in 1901 and the exhibition discloses which of the two found most favour with the royal couple.
The design of the exhibition is by Maarten Spruyt and Tsur Reshef. The lavishly illustrated Dutch-language catalogue, Nederland dineert. Vier eeuwen tafelcultuur, offers the first ever reliable survey of four centuries of Dutch table settings and contains historical essays. For the museum’s youngest visitors there is also a children’s picture book and a related exhibition in the children’s gallery. The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and the Netherlands Nutrition Centre (Voedingscentrum) are joining forces to organize a range of activities during the Dutch Dining exhibition.
The exhibition includes items generously loaned by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Museum, Museum Van Loon, Kastelen Middachten, Amerongen, Twickel and de Haar, Fundatie van Renswoude Utrecht, Koninklijke Verzamelingen Den Haag, RCE/Jachthuis St. Hubertus, Huis der Provincie Arnhem and private collections.
Nederland Dineert: Vier Eeuwen Tafelcultuur (Zwolle: Waanders, 2015), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-9462620575, €34.50.
Koken en eten hoort als vanzelfsprekend bij het leven. Veel esthetiek komt hier in eerste instantie niet bij kijken. Maar zodra gezamenlijk wordt gegeten, wordt eten een sociale bezigheid, een middel tot communicatie, tot representatie, tot onderscheid. Voor dit boek is een keur aan specialisten op zoek gegaan naar de specifieke eetcultuur van Nederland. Aan de hand van een tiental authentieke ensembles van eetvertrekken van verschillende landgoederen en paleizen met daarbij bewaard gebleven voorwerpen, wordt het dineren in de afgelopen vier eeuwen geïllustreerd. Laat u betoveren door de verhalen rond de maaltijd en de uitstraling van volledig opgetuigde tafels, gedekt met tafellinnen, porselein en zilver, decoraties van suikerwerk en bloemen, van de bijbehorende meubels en het dienstpersoneel in livrei.
Exhibition | Bouke de Vries: War & Pieces
Bouke de Vries, War & Pieces, 19th- and 21st-century porcelain and mixed media, 2012 (Photograph by Tim Higgins).
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Complementing the exhibition Dutch Dining: Four Centuries of Table Settings at the Gemeentemuseum (with thanks to Hélène Bremer for pointing out both) . . .
Bouke de Vries: War & Pieces
The Holburne Museum, Bath, 1 September — 2 December 2012
Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, 17 October 2015 — 28 February 2016
The Harley Gallery, Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, 4 November 2017 — 7 January 2018
A nuclear bomb seems to have been dropped in this installation by artist Bouke de Vries. The eight-metre table, with a mushroom cloud as its centrepiece, is the scene of a fierce battle: thousands of fragments of porcelain mixed with parts of modern plastic toys. De Vries’s huge War & Pieces is a contemporary interpretation of the decorative sculptures that adorned 17th- and 18th-century banqueting tables. Specially for the Gemeentemuseum de Vries has for the first time designed cutlery, producing his ominous-looking set entitled Kalashnikov. His work is an interesting contrast with the reconstructed table settings in the museum’s Dutch dining exhibition—opening at the same time—that gives a unique insight into the history of dining culture in the Netherlands.
In previous centuries an extravagant ball or banquet might be held on the eve of a major battle—notably that given by the Duchess of Richmond the night before the battle of Waterloo in 1815, exactly 200 years ago. The decorative sugar or, later, porcelain table sculptures at such events might depict classical allegories, temples of love, or perhaps even the impending battle. War & Pieces is Bouke de Vries’s (b.1960) contemporary response to this old tradition. Besides war, chaos and aggression, the installation also features humour and beauty, undermining classical symbols in a satirical and critical way. By mixing contemporary references and objects with historical ceramics, De Vries builds a bridge between the past and the present and creates his own visual language.
In his work as a restorer, Bouke de Vries became moved by the beauty of imperfection, of deconstruction. Six years ago he started producing artworks using broken ceramics that were beyond repair. “A beautiful 17th-century soup dish with a small hairline crack has almost no market value. Which is strange, because it is still lovely to look at. Rather than hiding the cracks, I emphasise the imperfections and give the piece a new life,” he explains. He never deliberately breaks objects to use in his work. Instead, he sources his old ‘bits and pieces’ online, through auctions, and at antique markets such as Portobello Road near his home in London.
War & Pieces, the largest work in the exhibition of the same name, is a travelling installation that de Vries adapts to each new location. Originally created in 2012 for the Holburne Museum in Bath, it has also appeared at Charlottenburg Castle in Berlin, Chateau de Nyon in Switzerland and at the Taiwan Ceramics Biennale. The exhibition at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag also features a number of his smaller sculptures, including a series of ‘memory jars’—in which broken pieces of Delftware are contained within glass jars made in the shape of the original object—and a ceramics map of the Netherlands entitled ‘Homeland White’. In this collage, de Vries uses shards of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch white domestic Delftware recovered from archaeological digs.
Bouke de Vries, Memory Tobacco Jar 2, 18th-century Dutch Delft drug jar and glass, 2015 (Photograph by Tim Higgins).
Exhibition | Following Hercules: The Story of Classical Art
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Press release (11 September 2015) from The Fitzwilliam:
Following Hercules: The Story of Classical Art
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 25 September — 6 December 2015
Curated by Caroline Vout
A colossal polystyrene statue of Hercules by contemporary artist Matt Darbyshire will be the star exhibit in a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum exploring the story of classical art. How did artefacts made in the Mediterranean millennia ago come to define western art? To show us how Greece and Rome’s gods and heroes came to inhabit post-antique painting and sculpture, the Fitzwilliam Museum has called upon one of them to act as a guide: Hercules.
Hercules and the Erymanthian Boar, ca. 1790, Wedgwood, Etruria, Staffordshire, Jasperware plaque, h. 212 mm (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum)
Hercules is one of the best-loved ancient heroes. Known in antiquity for completing twelve tasks or ‘labours’ that confirmed his status as a god, Hercules is today tasked with one more—to tell the story of classical art. Hercules is brought to life by each of the forty objects on display (from exquisite gems and coins, Renaissance drawings and bronzes, to eighteenth-century paintings, and Matthew Darbyshire’s giant polystyrene statue…). Their interaction also reveals how classical art was born, and gives classical art on-going relevance.
The exhibition takes its lead from its star exhibit, a colossal sculpture by Cambridge-born artist Matthew Darbyshire. Darbyshire’s intervention is a version of the Farnese Hercules, a marble statue unearthed in Rome in 1546, but is made from sheets of polystyrene—classical art for a consumerist age. Up close, its cut, crisp polystyrene layers make it appear pixelated, but step back, and the statue comes into focus, shining like marble. Back in 1850, two years after the Founder’s Building opened to the public, the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibited another Farnese Hercules, a plaster version, now in Cambridge’s Museum of Classical Archaeology. Before being given to the Fitzwilliam, it stood in a private house in Battersea, where it moved London’s artists to tears. The Fitzwilliam Museum’s own collection is well equipped with prototypes and later versions of the Farnese Hercules: from a bronze statuette of the first century BCE, through Hendrick Goltzius’s sixteenth-century engraving of the Farnese statue’s rear view, Wedgwood’s white on blue cameo plaque, and William Blake’s illustration of the statue for Abraham Rees’s The Cyclopædia, or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature. The Museum’s collection also provides competing images of Hercules—images of Hercules young, drunk, or dressed as a woman, in bronze, wood and painted porcelain. These give context to Darbyshire’s sculpture, underlining that classicism and modernism are not opposites. In the fast moving, digital age in which we live, we perhaps need tradition more than ever.
The exhibition is curated by Dr Caroline Vout, Reader in Classics in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Christ’s College, and is part of her British-Academy funded research project entitled Classical Art: A Life History.
Caroline Vout, Following Hercules: The Story of Classical Art (Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum, 2015), 48 pages, ISBN: 978-1910731024, £5.
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Note (added 2 December 2018) — The posting was updated to include information about the catalogue.
Exhibition | Cradled in Caricature
The exhibition is mounted in connection with Ronald Searle: ‘Obsessed with Drawing’. From the press release. . .
Cradled in Caricature: Visual Humour in Satirical Prints and Drawings
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 13 October 2015 — 31 January 2016
Cradled in Caricature: Visual Humour in Satirical Prints and Drawings looks at how artists, caricaturists and cartoonists from Hogarth to the present day create visual jokes to make their audiences laugh.
In [Ronald] Searle’s timeline of caricature, he highlighted the high and low points of its history. In the time of Hogarth, Gillray and Rowlandson he described caricature as ‘a vigorous weapon’, whereas he felt it had declined in the 19th century to ‘drawing-room gentility’. He was happy to be a part of its recovery during the 20th century, making the final point of his timeline Private Eye.
Making visual jokes is hard and not every artist has the skill. Gillray was sent designs by enthusiastic amateurs, which he would translate into print. Cradled in Caricature focuses on the techniques and tricks that worked, and which still have the power to amuse us today. These methods range from simple exaggeration of facial features, costumes and fashion fads; clever juxtapositions and contrasts of body types; absurd, nonsense comedy; physical, burlesque comedy; dark humour; bawdy humour; and more complicated word-play, with the interplay of word and image or ironic literary allusions. The works are drawn from the Fitzwilliam’s collection with key loans from Andrew Edmunds and Benjamin Lemer.
Renuka Reddy’s Search for Traditional Chintz Techniques
Writing for the the V&A’s blog for the museum’s fall exhibition The Fabric of India, Renuka Reddy, “a contemporary chintz-maker,” recounts “the story of her search for lost techniques, the challenges she’s faced as a designer-cum-maker, and how the V&A’s collection has inspired her work. Renuka’s studio, Red Tree, is based in Bengaluru.”
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“Guest Post: Renuka Reddy’s Adventures in Chintz,” V&A Blog (6 October 2015).
Color swatches. © RedTree Textile Studio
If only I could time travel…
It was nearly two years after its publication that I got my hands on the book Chintz: Indian Textiles for the West written by Rosemary Crill and published by the V&A. I vividly remember my response to the spectacular plates, the desire to make something so beautiful. Little did I know how this reaction would change my life in ways I could not imagine.
By chintz, I refer to hand-painted resist-and-mordant dyed cottons. I am particularly interested in the intricate resist work of chintz exported from India to the West between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. This is where I draw my inspiration from.
My goal was to produce chintz, which at that time meant working with craftsmen. So I went in search of one in Machilipatnam and Srikalahasti, two historic towns in the state of Andhra Pradesh where kalamkari (literally ‘pen-work’)
is practiced today. . .
The full posting is available here»
Exhibition | Le dauphin, l’artiste et le philosophe
Opening this week at the Château de Fontainebleau:
Le dauphin, l’artiste et le philosophe: Autour de l’Allégorie à la mort du dauphin de Lagrenée l’Aîné
Château de Fontainebleau, 17 October 2015 — 25 January 2016
Curated by Marine Kisiel
Louis Jean François Lagrenée, Le Dauphin mourant entouré de sa famille (Château de Fontainebleau)
Le château de Fontainebleau poursuit la mise en lumière de ses collections en consacrant, à l’automne 2015, une exposition à l’Allégorie à la mort du dauphin, une œuvre de Louis Lagrenée, dit l’Aîné.
Le 20 décembre 1765, Louis-Ferdinand, dauphin de France, s’éteint au château de Fontainebleau. Il est le fils de Louis XV et le père des futurs Louis XVI, Louis XVIII et Charles X. Le détail de sa vie ne nous est parvenu que par les représentations—livresques et artistiques—dont il a fait l’objet. Elles ont favorisé une reconstruction biographique posthume, souvent idéalisée, imprégnée par le contexte de l’opposition entre le parti dévot et les Encyclopédistes.
Exposée au Salon de 1767, l’Allégorie à la mort du dauphin participe de cette floraison artistique. Elle a suscité de nombreuses réactions, notamment celle de Diderot. D’abord critique acerbe du tableau, Diderot prend toutefois part, quelques année plus tard, à l’élaboration du mausolée d’un dauphin auquel tout semblait pourtant l’opposer.
En faisant converger les figures du dauphin, de Lagrenée et de Diderot, l’exposition se propose d’éclairer d’un jour nouveau cette allégorie, et d’examiner sa place dans les représentations de la mort et de l’immortalité que nous a léguées le siècle des Lumières.
L’exposition Le dauphin, l’artiste et le philosophe marque le 250e anniversaire de la mort du Dauphin Louis-Ferdinand et introduit une saison culturelle dédiée à Louis XV au château de Fontainebleau.
Additional information is available here»
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